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Jun 7, 2015

It's a Man's World: A Gay Threesome from the 1960s

Speaking of Ted Bessell, before That Girl, he starred in It’s a Man’s World (1962-63) as
Tom-Tom, a college student obsessed by Beat poetry and jazz, both emblematic of
the multisexual bohemian subcultures of the 1950’s.

Tom-Tom lives on a houseboat with his teenage brother Howie (Michael Burns, right) and boyfriend Wes (Glenn Corbett, abovewho by the way was bisexual, and appeared in Physique Pictorial under the name Glenn Robinson).

But the couple is not happy; they are always arguing about chores and money. One night Tom-Tom
can’t take it any more. He wanders into
a waterfront tavern, where newly-arrived country boy Vern (Randy Boone, left) is playing the guitar.

In perhaps the first
gay pick-up in television history, the two exchange suspicious glances and then
knowing grins. The next scene shows them returning to the houseboat to spend the night together, and in the morning Tom-Tom tells Wes that it was not just a bar pick-up – Vern is moving in.

Wes gets somewhat snippy about this new threat to his dominance, but soon he decides that having a cute farmboy around might be fun, and the episode ends
with the trio splashing about in the water, the first gay three-way relationship in television history.

This series was before my time, and I only saw one episode, thanks to an ebay collector. Unfortunately, according to tvobscurities.com, later episodes backed away from the gay subtext -- really more of a text -- and gave them girlfriends.